After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday’s Web Site
Wah wah wah waaaaah (as in sad trombone)
UPDATE: See, also, the web game, Paywall!
Dear clusterflock
“The meek shall inherit the earth.”
pupation
I love the history of this post’s comment thread.
Acting!
Philip Seymour Hoffman is often mentioned as the best actor of his generation. I’m beginning to think Maggie Gyllenhaal is the best actor of whatever generation she belongs to. Discuss.
math anxiety
Student math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety at the start of the school year, the researchers report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But by the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students — but not the boys — were to agree that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading.”
Chronicles of Seymour-Hoffman
Ned Hepburn, (the genius behind, erm, Boner Party) has also been posting tidbits from his forthcoming “book” ‘The Many Faces Of Seymour-Hoffman’
“During the filming of the 1999 drama ‘The Talented Mister Ripley’, Seymour-Hoffman developed an intense infatuation with American Girl dolls, the doll company that produces historically and factually based dolls based on young women of a certain era in American history.
Inbetween takes, Seymour-Hoffman would produce a doll and start to recite his own lines in the voice of Kitt Kettredge, an American Girl doll based on a girl who would have existed the Great Depression. During the scene of his own murder, he refused to act with anyone else but her, slowly disrobing her and holding back his own tears, feeding the lifeless doll fistfuls of M&M’s. This unnerved co-stars Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, who refused to be in the same room as him during this already emotional day of filming. Using an array of mirrors, the film appears to have Philip Seymour-Hoffman in the same room as Matt Damon, when infact Hoffman was forty feet away in his own trailer playing the same five Supertramp songs on repeat before every single take while requesting fresh M&M’s for Kitt. Consequentially, each take took an hour to film.
Coincidentally, during the scene in which Hoffman is strangled, Kitt Kettredge’s hands are used.”
Needless to say, this isn’t uh, factually based.
no more prison fantasies
Singer was told by prison officials that he could not keep the materials because Dungeons & Dragons “promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling,” according to the ruling. The prison later developed a more comprehensive policy against all types of fantasy games, the court said.
Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park, a pictorial
High-rise superblocks and identical clusters of row houses set apart from the urban grid have been much maligned as some of the major wrongdoings of modernism, but Detroit’s Lafayette Park—the first urban-renewal project in the United States—tells a vastly different story. Within a sprawling, decentralized city that has suffered near-disastrous decline, this racially and economically diverse enclave just northeast of downtown has not only aged gracefully but today flourishes with new life.
Mo’forum in Paris this weekend
I have a habit of wandering into rooms and buildings on my walks around a city and while in Paris last November I wandered into this huge drawing/zine expo by the Canal St. Martin. I took one of these flyers announcing what looks like the same arrangement again, happening this weekend, so if you’re in Paris you might want to have a look in.
the efficacy of slime mold
Slime molds are very efficient at mapping networks and systems:
Using the slime mold’s performance as a guide, the researchers created a mathematical model that they say may help people design other networks, like those used in mobile communications.
(via marginal revolution)
Hayek versus Keynes
This was on NPR yesterday.
quote out of context
“In his closet, among his vestments, there was hung on a clothes hanger a particular kind of belt for pants, which he used as a whip,” Oder writes.
Don’t drive into smoke
do I need a tissue?
One astrobiologist says the best place to look for aliens may be right here on Earth. Paul Davies of Arizona State University said Tuesday that extraterrestrial life may have found its way to this planet at several different times.
If so, Davies says, the aliens could be “right under our noses — or even in our noses.”
from the spam
Morally, small 1950s hideous Nova Scotia would actually be groundbreaking track pathways and new, they would match subsequent permits. While he implies no different friend, it is strongly written that Gaddafi tracks axiomatic remedy over the interest. Since the changes are twice pointed for cam, they were still used.
10th Street Bridge
From the South Side of Pittsburgh, you can cross the Monongahela River in lots of places – the 10th Street Bridge will let you walk to downtown.
Arthur Russell
I have been listening to this album for days. My obsession is official.
Can you eat it?
Cap. Trade.
Steve Jobs delivers the annual presidential address:
So today, we’re introducing a new plan. It’s called Stimulus 2GS, and it’s sleeker than any economic recovery package ever created. It’s got bridges, it’s got schools, it’s got broadband Internet. All that, and it’s super easy to use—you can control it from iTunes. Pretty cool, huh?
(APPLAUSE.)
Now let’s take a look at national security. When we got in here last year, torture was basically OK. We were water-boarding people and doing all sorts of terrible things. If you’re the president of the United States, how do you solve this? Hmm. Oh wait, we have solved this. We banned torture. Boom. Now that’s what I call an amazing breakthrough.
dear clusterflock
Rank the days of the week.
Bubble Wrap Turns 50
The product once envisioned as a new type of wallpaper turns 50 this month, and enthusiasts’ obsession with it has spawned more than 250 Facebook pages devoted to Bubble Wrap.
Ken Aurichio, communications director for Sealed Air, the Elmwood Park-based company that manufactures Bubble Wrap, thought he’d witnessed every form of Bubble Wrap mania until he received a wedding invitation last year from a woman in Ohio who said she would wear the product on her trip down the aisle.
Fuck it. I’m using it as wallpaper.
Taxes
I made about twenty-one thousand dollars last year?
and somehow owe a thousand dollars to the government.
How is anyone ever supposed to lift themselves out of poverty?
Solar iPhone Charger
The XX – VCR
via It’s Nice That.
Corporations rock the vote
I’m a big fan of modest proposals:
I’m highly impressed with your recent decision to vaporize limits on corporate political spending. It’s the kind of campaign finance reform our ailing res publica needs. In fact, I found it so inspirational, here’s an even better idea.
Let’s give corporations the right to vote. One share, one vote. The logic? It’s simple. Corporations are people; all people are created equal; ergo, corporations must have equal rights — and no right is more important than the right to vote. (Well, maybe the right to buy fully automatic machine guns, but that’s another story).
Goldman Sachs, for example, has 514,080,000 shares outstanding — so they’d get 514 millon votes (in fact, maybe we should give them more, because they’re so smart). Ford has 3.31 billion shares outstanding, so they’d get approximately 2.8 billion more votes than Goldman.
Of course, we won’t have achieved parity until Bank of America can get crotch-cupped at the airport.
